But pride in the preacher? Of all those who surround the Lord Jesus, you would expect humility in the pastor. Just as certain weeds grow best in certain soils, so pride grows perhaps most easily in the heart of a Christian minister. Surely the pastor could afford to stay low. He has been honored by God.
Yes, toxic leaders are the distinct minority of Christian leaders. But they can do harm to the cause of Christ disproportionate to their numbers. And they can get away with their behavior for years because they often have a charismatic and charming personality. Charming like a snake.
The biblical message of grace is wonderful, glorious and life-transforming. We can’t live without it for one second of our lives. But there is a message being preached today in the name of a new grace reformation, mixing powerful truth with dangerous error. I call it hyper-grace.
One of the foundational doctrines of the hyper-grace message is that God does not see the sins of his children, since we have already been made righteous by the blood of Jesus and since all of our sins, past, present and future, have already been forgiven.
That means that the Holy Spirit never convicts believers of sin, that believers never need to confess their sins to God, and that believers never need to repent of their sins, since God sees them as perfect in his sight.
It is easy to see how such teaching can be dangerous, especially to a believer being tempted to compromise.
Don’t allow the double-mindedness, indecision, and the pitiful meows of the paper lions of doubt, unbelief, fear of man, double-mindedness, and indecision that inevitably come to attack your confidence in Christ in you win in your life! LET OUT THE ROAR of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah from within your spirit! HIS ROAR will SHUT THE MOUTHS of all the lying pretenders, for HE IS THE KING of the jungle of the Spirit Realm!
Doctrinal deviation, degeneration, and denigration, which is being advocated more and more by some Christian leaders of all stripes and affiliation as a bridge to so-called “unity,” is an extremely perilous path to travel. It is an undeniable and unavoidable law of physics that the most infinitesimal degree of deviation from a straight line results in a wider and wider angle of deviation as it extends forth. While it is so very true that the Church is guilty of “majoring on the minors, and minoring on the majors,” yet established foundational Truth, i.e., sound doctrine, cannot be violated or deviated in order to achieve Biblical unity.
If you are called by God to a Kingdom-assignment, it is not because you are in any way adequate, qualified, or able within yourself to accomplish the task, but rather because He has given you an opportunity to prove your pliability in His hands, your willingness to be re-made into His Image, and that you have a contrite spirit that moves you to rely entirely upon Him and His Spirit to empower you to accomplish what He needs you to accomplish.
To many people, including many who claim to be Christians or believers in Christ, the matter of the existence and operations of the devil on earth are either basically an unknown or a spiritual conundrum. That is understandable, given the fact that unbiblical or in some cases, antibiblical, preaching and teaching on the matter is ubiquitous, even in the context of self-purported Christian churches. The central theory of that biblically-incorrect teaching to varying degrees is the somewhat misleading assertion: “Jesus defeated the devil on the Cross of Calvary.” While that statement and the set of teachings it represents bears some truth, it nevertheless is not “the whole truth and nothing but the truth!” Rather, it is actually partial truth.
Christ–who Himself is TRUTH–is the only Source of true freedom! No man can give you freedom, and therefore no man can take it away. Truth is a per-SON–God the Son, Jesus. Jesus said, Jesus said to him, “I AM the way, and the TRUTH, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me” (John 14:6); “If the SON therefore shall make you free, ye shall be FREE indeed” (John 8:36); and, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the TRUTH shall make you FREE” (John 8:31-32).
America has become a fatherless nation. A fatherless nation producing an alarmingly high and ever-growing number of illegitimate children—i.e., born out of wedlock, or to unmarried biological parents—many of whom were/are abandoned by one or both parents to become wards of the state, or given up for adoption by biologically-unrelated adoptive-parents or government-paid foster-parents. More and more of those adoptive/foster-parents now are homosexual cohabitants, despite the fact that homosexuality is the ultimate affront to fatherhood and enmity against God the Father.
The holistic abrogation, subversion, and replacement of the Fivefold Ministry Offices through which Jesus intended for the Church He was building to be governed and spiritually edified with a humanly contrived and appointed ecclesiastical hierarchy of human clerics what were neither anointed nor appointed by God to lead and instruct the Church is the primary cause behind the twelve centuries of spiritual debacle and deconstruction known as The Dark Ages.
Spirit Life Magazine